Public must decide if lands should be actively managed

Wood, every human on this earth uses it. From primitive warming fires, spears, bows and arrows to wood-based high tech composites, ethanol and biodiesel, wood is used in more products than most people realize. Thank God wood is a renewable resource. Trees can get along fine without humans, but humans can't survive without trees.

Even those people who hold the idealistic view that no trees should be harvested from our National Forests, sold and used by people, use wood products such as writing paper, envelops, stamps and computers to file appeals and lawsuits to stop commercial harvest of trees. Some might say these people are hypocrites. There are no laws against being a hypocrite, and I'm glad this is a free country where we can be as hypocritical and idealistic as we want.

Current buzzwords being tossed around with the continuing debate over active forest management include "industrial logging" and "road-building" when used with evil connotations. Other buzzwords are "healthy forests" and "catastrophic wildfires", when used by those who think we ought to be actively managing our forests. I have just a brief comment about these buzzwords.

Industrial logging is nothing more than creating a business to meet the demands for wood products that we individuals don't have the time or ability to provide for ourselves. Nothing evil about that.

I like roads. Roads take us home, to our favorite camping, fishing, hunting, hiking, site-seeing, berry-picking and firewood gathering areas. They also take industrial loggers to the trees we want to use for home building and myriad other uses and also to remove in order to improve wildlife habitat and reduce the intensity of future fires that may occur in and near our communities.

"Healthy forests" mean different things to different people. I suspect that forests don't care (if they could) what our diagnosis is; they function under natural forces with or without the human component included in the ecosystem. What some people might see as a forest having too many dead and dying trees and therefore "unhealthy", is nothing more than a successional stage that is on the verge of providing enough fuel to allow fire to kill off all of the lives trees and initiate development of young trees.

A fire is "catastrophic" if it burns down your home, causes communities to evacuate until the smoke and fire clears, causes your community drinking water to turn gritty and smoke flavored, and totally change the characteristic landscape of your favorite recreational spot. Otherwise fires are probably okay to let alone without throwing taxpayer money at in trying to extinguish a natural process that isn't going to destroy the trees we want to use.

I believe the current level of taxpayer funding required to implement management on our national forests has reached a level that should be considered a major boondoggle, given the current appeals and litigation procedures. I think it's time for the American public to provide the federal land managers, Congressional leaders and the Administration a clear referendum on whether or not we should actively manage our national forests for the greatest good, for the greatest number of people, in the long run (to quote Gifford Pinchot) or, to convert all of our national forests into parklands, to be managed in a purely custodial manner.

Barry Wynsma, forester

Bonners Ferry